9/02/2008 @ 12:00PM

Prime-Time TV's 20 Top-Earning Women

In early 2002, Friends star Jennifer Aniston and her cast mates struck a landmark deal with NBC to bring their sitcom back for a ninth and final season. Reacting to an “everybody or nobody” plea, the network agreed to pay each of the series’ six stars $1 million per episode.

When “must-see TV” was more than just a tag line, that deal made sense. The show had averaged nearly 25 million viewers per episode, or 26% of viewing households, many of them in the advertiser-beloved 18- to 34-year-old demographic. In addition to serving as the anchor to the
General Electric
-owned network’s storied Thursday night lineup, the repeatable comedy was already minting money in syndication.

Some six years later, such a deal would never be done. Today’s most-watched scripted series, Desperate Housewives, garners only 17 million viewers each week, or 16% of households, and many of its advertising messages are skipped by digital video recorders.

With cable and Web offerings vying for viewers’ and advertisers’ attention and viewing habits evolving faster than the monitoring systems tracking them, hits aren’t as easy to come by today. The result of both shrinking audiences and after-market opportunities for TV fare: shrinking salaries for the medium’s stars.

For the top earners in the medium today, television is only part of the financial picture. That’s why our list of Hollywood’s Top Earning Prime-Time Stars is ranked according to estimated earnings not only from television work, but also from production, movie, endorsement and fashion ventures between June 1, 2007 and June 1, 2008. (Voice-only actresses were omitted from the list, and ties were broken by Web popularity.)

Take America‘s Next Top Model’s Tyra Banks, who tops our list with $23 million during the year-long period, thanks to her work both in front of and behind the camera. In addition to her eponymous–and highly successful–daytime talk show, the model-turned-mogul has scored legions of fans and lofty paychecks as a producer and judge on the CW’s hit reality competition series.

Last fall, Banks also signed a multi-year deal with Warner Bros. to develop still more projects for the big and small screens. Among her upcoming ventures: Stylista, a CW reality show set in the magazine world, and a direct-to-DVD series based on the best-selling Clique series of books for teens.

Grey’s Anatomy star Katherine Heigl banked $13 million over the course of the year. Though steamy plot lines on the ABC hospital drama have made her a household name, the bulk of Heigl’s earnings come from a combination of film work (last summer’s Knocked Up and this year’s 27 Dresses) and endorsement deals (she’s the face of a Nautica fragrance and endorses a line of medical scrubs).

And it’s much the same for Desperate Housewives’ Eva Longoria Parker, who earned $9 million this past year. Like Heigl, she parlayed her small-screen success into a slew of high-paying endorsement projects. Parker can be seen shilling for Bebe Sport’s athletic wear and L’Oréal shampoo.

“TV isn’t what it used to be,” laments one entertainment attorney who represents several top-tier television stars. “The notion that you’re going to have a show be successful and sell in the back-end and make a lot of money in syndication is remote these days.”

For decades, studios have produced their fare with what is called deficit financing: To offset some of the costs during the early years of a program’s run, its studio will charge the network a fee for the exclusive right to air it for a period of time. To fully cover its costs, however, the studio bets it will be able to sell the show for future airings once that time has lapsed.

Today, that gamble is far bigger, the odds far less favorable. In the new digital world order where viewers have instant access to repeats through DVRs, DVDs and iTunes downloads, the long-term profit potential from the traditional syndication system is hardly a guarantee–a vexing reality for series stars looking to profit from their program’s back-end boon.

That wasn’t so when NBC’s long-running hit Seinfeld dominated the Nielsens during the 1990s. In its final season, the top-rated sitcom garnered 34.1 million viewers per episode, or 33% of households, according to Nielsen Media Research. Nearly a decade later, it’s still making millions in DVD sales and syndication, repeating in almost 200 markets and consistently ranking as the No. 1 off-network comedy.

Jerry Seinfeld collected $1 million per episode, in addition to a hefty back-end haul, for the show’s final season. Co-stars Jason Alexander,Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards each took home a reported $600,000 per show.

Successes of Seinfeld’s size and stature simply don’t exist in today’s increasingly fragmented television landscape. Rather, higher production costs are being paid to reach fewer viewers–with the exception of the occasional American Idol episode or a championship sporting event, an audience of 30 million-plus is almost unfathomable–and the medium’s stars are being compensated accordingly.

That’s why the ladies of Desperate Housewives–Marcia Cross, Felicity Huffman, Teri Hatcher and Parker, all of whom make our list–earned only $200,000 per episode each for appearing on television’s most-watched scripted show.

“There’s still plenty of money to be had in television,” says Leslie Siebert, a veteran Hollywood agent who helped negotiate the landmark Friends deal as star David Schwimmer’s representative. “But those million-dollar salaries, unfortunately, are long gone.”

Forbes and E! Entertainment teamed up for a one-hour special on the Top 20 TV Cash Queens, which will premiere on E! on Thursday, Sept. 4, at 8 p.m. EST. The special features exclusive interviews with prime-time television’s leading ladies, including Heidi Klum, Paula Abdul and Kathryn Morris.